Shinbutsu shugo

Foxes sacred to Shinto kami Inari, a torii, a Buddhist tower, and Buddhist figures together at Jōgyō-ji, Kamakura

Shinbutsu shūgō (神仏習合, Shinbutsu shūgō) literally "fusion of kami and buddhas" (also called Shinbutsu konkō (神仏混淆, Shinbutsu konkō), term which however has a negative connotation of bastardization and randomness) is the Japanese syncretism of Buddhism and local religious beliefs. When Buddhism was introduced through China in the late Asuka period (6th century), rather than discard the old belief system the Japanese tried to reconcile it with the new, assuming both were true. As a consequence, Buddhist temples (寺, tera) were attached to local deity shrines (神社, jinja) and vice versa and devoted to both kami and Buddha. The depth of the resulting influence of Buddhism on the local religion can be seen for example in the fact that the type of shrine we see today, with a large worship hall and images, is itself of Buddhist origin.

The assimilation of Buddhism

The debate over the relationship between Buddhism and Shinto

The resulting relationship between Buddhism and Shinto in Japan is so deep and complex that at least two distinct and mutually exclusive views exist on the subject, and this is the root of a discussion that hasn't yet come to a conclusion.

• On the one hand, the Shinto establishment states that Shinto is the indigenous religion of Japan and that it has existed as such continuously since pre-history. Shinto consists of all the peculiarly Japanese rituals and beliefs shaped by Japanese history from prehistory to the present. The term "Shinto" itself was coined in the 6th century to differentiate the loosely organized local religion from imported Buddhism. This is the concept normally accepted by both society and traditional historians.

• On the other one finds the position of Japanese specialist Toshio Kuroda (and his supporters) who, in a famous article ("Shinto in the History of Japanese Religion," published in English in 1981) has argued that Shinto as an independent religion was born only in the modern period after emerging in the Middle Ages as an offshoot of Buddhism. Kuroda's main argument is that Shinto as a distinct religion is a Meiji era invention of Japanese nationalist ideologues (see the next section). He points out how the state formalization of kami rituals and the state ranking of shrines during the Heian period were not the emergence of Shinto as an independent religion, but an effort to explain local beliefs in Buddhist terms. He also says that, if it's true that the two characters for "Shinto" appear very early in the historical record, for example in the Nihon Shoki, this doesn't mean today's Shinto already existed as a religion because they were originally used as a name for Taoism or even for religion in general. Indeed, according to Kuroda many features of Shinto, for example the worshiping of mirrors and swords or the very structure of Ise Shrine (Shinto's holiest and most important site) are typical of Taoism. The term Shinto in old texts therefore does not necessarily indicate something uniquely Japanese.

According to the first view, then, the two religions were at the time of their first meeting already formed and independent and thereafter just coexisted with non-essential exchanges while, according to the second, Buddhism, meeting local beliefs in Japan, actually produced today's Shinto.

The assimilation process

In either case, it can be said that the fusion of Buddhism with the local kami started as soon as the first arrived in Japan, as proven by Mononobe no Okoshi's statement that:

The kami of our land will be offended if we worship a foreign kami

In other words, Mononobe saw Buddha as just another kami, and not as a different kind of God possibly different in nature from his own. Foreign kami were called banshin (蕃神, "barbarian gods") or busshin (仏神, "Buddhist gods"), and understood to be more or less like local ones. Initially, therefore, the conflict between the two religions was political, and not religious, in nature, a struggle between the progressive Soga clan, that wanted a more international outlook for the country, and the conservative Mononobe clan, that wanted the contrary. Buddhism was not passive in the process, but was itself ready to assimilate and be assimilated. By the time it entered Japan it was already syncretic, having adapted to and amalgamated with other religions and cultures in India, China and Korea. Already while in India, it had absorbed Hinduistic divinities like Brahma (Bonten in Japanese) and Indra (Taishakuten). When it arrived in Japan, it already had a disposition towards producing the combinatory gods that the Japanese would call shūgōshin (習合神, shūgōshin). Searching for the origins of a kami in Buddhist scriptures was felt to be nothing out of the ordinary.

However, if monks didn't doubt the existence of kami, they certainly saw them as inferior to their Buddhas. Hindu gods had already been treated analogously: they had been thought of as unilluminated and prisoner of (samsara). Buddhist claims of superiority encountered resistance, and monks tried to overcome them by deliberately integrating kami in their system. Several strategies to do this were developed and deployed. The process of amalgamation is usually divided in three stages.

The first articulation of the difference between Japanese religious ideas and Buddhism, and the first effort to reconcile the two is attributed to Prince Shōtoku (574 - 622), and the first signs that the differences between the two world views were beginning to become manifest to the Japanese in general appear at the time of Emperor Temmu (673 - 86). Accordingly, one of the first efforts to reconcile Shinto and Buddhism was made in the eight century during the Nara period founding so-called jungūji (神宮寺, jungūji), that is "shrine-temples". Behind the inclusion in a Shinto shrine of Buddhist religious objects was the idea that the kami were lost beings in need of liberation through the power of Buddha. Kami were thought to be subject to karma and reincarnation like human beings, and early Buddhist stories tell how that the task of helping suffering kami was assumed by wandering monks. A local kami would appear in a dream to the monk, telling him about his suffering. To improve the kami's karma through rites and the reading of sutras, the monk would build a temple next to the kami's shrine. Such groupings were created already in the 7th century, for example in Usa, Kyūshū, where kami Hachiman was worshiped together with Miroku Bosatsu (Maitreya). The building of temples at shrines produced shrine-temples complexes, which in turn accelerated the amalgamation process.

At the end of the same century, in what is considered the second stage of the amalgamation, the kami Hachiman was declared to be protector-deity of the Dharma and a little bit later a bodhisattva. Shrines for them started to be built at temples, marking an important step ahead in the process of amalgamation of kami and buddhist cults. When the great Buddha at Tōdai-ji in Nara was built, within the temple grounds was also erected a shrine for Hachiman, according to the legend because of a wish expressed by the kami himself. Hachiman considered this his reward for having helped the temple find the gold and copper mines from which the metal for the great statue had come. After this, temples in the entire country adopted tutelary kami (chinju (鎮守/鎮主, chinju).

The third and final stage of the fusion took place in the ninth century with the development of the honji suijaku (本地垂迹, honji suijaku) theory according to which Japanese kami are emanations of buddhas, bodhisattvas or devas who mingle with us to lead us to the Buddhist Way. Many kami changed then from potentially dangerous spirits to be improved through contact with the Buddhist law to local emanations of buddhas and bodhisattvas which possess their wisdom. The buddhas and the kami were now indivisible.

The two religions after the Separation Order

In 1868 with the Shinbutsu Bunri (the attempt for a separation of Shinto and Buddhism during the Meiji period), temples and shrines were separated by law with the Shinto and Buddhism Separation Order (神仏判然令, Shinbutsu Hanzenrei), the former functioning for Buddhism, the latter for Shinto.

Hovever, in spite of more than a century of formal separation of the two religions, temples or shrines that do not separate them are still common, as proven for example by the existence of some important Buddhist Inari temples. Most temples still have at least one small shrine. Even prominent religious institutions in both camps still give evidence of integration of the two religions. The great Kenchō-ji temple, number one of Kamakura's great Zen temples (the Kamakura Gozan) includes two shrines. One of the islands in the right-side pond of Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gū shrine in Kamakura hosts a sub-shrine dedicated to goddess Benzaiten, a Buddhist deity. For this reason, the sub-shrine was removed in 1868 at the time of the Shinbutsu Bunri, but rebuilt in 1956. The separation of the two religions must therefore be considered superficial, and shinbutsu shūgō still an accepted practice.

Still, a difference between the two religions is now felt to exist. Shinto scholar Karen Smyers comments:

The surprise of many of my informants regarding the existence of Buddhist Inari temples shows the success of the government's attempt to create separate conceptual categories regarding sites and certain identities, although practice remains multiple and nonexclusive.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Mark Teeuwen and Fabio Rambelli (Editors) (Dec. 27, 2002). Buddhas and Kami in Japan: Honji Suijaku as a Combinatory Paradigm. London: RoutledgeCurzon. ISBN 978-0415297479. 
• Scheid, Bernhard, (2008-4-16). Honji suijaku: Die Angleichung von Buddhas und Kami (in German). University of Vienna. Retrieved 2008-11-04.
• Kitagawa, Joseph (1987). On Understanding Japanese Religion. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691102290. 
• Kuroda, Toshio and James Dobbins, Suzanne Gray (1981). Shinto in the History of Japanese Religion, Journal of Japanese Studies (in English), Society for Japanese Studies. 
• Kamiya, Michinori (2000/08). Fukaku Aruku - Kamakura Shiseki Sansaku Vol. 1 (in Japanese). Kamakura: Kamakura Shunshūsha. ISBN 4774003409. 
• A history of Japan, R. H. P. Mason, J. G. Caiger, Tuttle Publishing; Revised edition (November 1, 1997), ISBN 0-8048-2097-X
• Tamura, Yoshiro (2000). "The Birth of the Japanese nation", Japanese Buddhism - A Cultural History, First Edition (in English), Tokyo: Kosei Publishing Company, 232 pages. ISBN 4-333-01684-3. 
• Satō, Makoto (2006/ 12/ 9). Shinto and Buddhism —Development of Shinbutsu Shūgō (Combinatory Religion of Kami and Buddhas)—. Retrieved 2008-05-12.
• John Breen, Mark Teuween (editors) (July 2000). Shinto in History: Ways of the Kami. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 978-0824823634. 
• Smyers, Karen Ann (1999). The Fox and the Jewel: Shared and Private Meanings in Contemporary Japanese Inari Worship. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-2102-5. 
• Dismantling stereotypes surrounding Japan's sacred entities by Fabio Rambelli, Japan Times, July 15, 2001 excerpted from Monumenta Nipponica, 56:2

de:Shinbutsu-Shūgō ja:神仏習合

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